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In our emails, sent once or twice a week, you'll receive:
• alerts on new threats to Maine's environment
• opportunities to join other Mainers on urgent actions
• updates on the decisions that impact our environment
• resources to help you create a cleaner, greener future

Updates

We're supporting local, sustainable agriculture

Maine has so many healthy, local farms, but we import more of our food from out of state than any other state in the continental U.S. Too much of this imported food comes from big factory farms that pollute waterways, foul the air and fuel global warming. We’re working to change this by enabling Maine’s small, sustainable farms to feed more of our state.

The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is a central strategy in the Northeastern states’ efforts to protect the region from global warming. The program, which took effect in 2009, has succeeded in cutting carbon dioxide emissions and demonstrating the effectiveness of cap-and-trade as a global warming solution while helping to sustain a growing regional economy. Now, nine Northeastern states are considering strengthening RGGI to drive additional reductions in global warming pollution.

PORTLAND—Five major Maine environmental and health advocacy
organizations today announced their support of the proposed Bowers
Wind Power Project, and the groups will be urging the Maine Department
of Environmental Protection to approve the 16-turbine wind project at
public hearings next week.

After another year in which many parts of the country were hit by hurricanes, scorching heat, devastating wildfires, crippling drought, severe storms and record flooding, a new Environment Maine Research & Policy Center report finds that weather-related disasters are affecting hundreds of millions of Americans and documents how global warming could lead to certain extreme weather events becoming even more common or more severe in the future.

The recent spill of Canadian heavy crude oil from a ruptured ExxonMobil pipeline in Mayflower, Ark., which forced the evacuation of 22 homes, has added fuel to the heated debate over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would bring heavy crude from the tar sands of Western Canada to Texas refineries along the Gulf of Mexico. The Arkansas spill comes only a month after the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the Canadian firm Enbridge to conduct yet more cleanups on a 2010 rupture and spill of heavy tar sands crude in the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. Now at $1 billion, that cleanup is the most expensive for an onshore spill in US history. The National Transportation Safety Board determined that Enbridge ignored pipeline cracks for years and did not detect the rupture for more than 17 hours.